1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to computers, and more particularly to apparatus, method and computer program product embodiments for replication of deduplicated data in a computing storage environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Data deduplication refers to the reduction and/or elimination of redundant data. In a data deduplication process, duplicate copies of data are reduced or eliminated, leaving a minimal amount of redundant copies, or a single copy of the data, respectively. Using deduplication processes provides a variety of benefits, such as reduction of required storage capacity and increased network bandwidth. Due to these and other benefits, deduplication has emerged in recent years as a highly important technological field in computing storage systems. Challenges to providing deduplication functionality include aspects such as efficiently finding duplicated data patterns in typically large storage repositories, and storing the data patterns in a deduplicated storage-efficient form.
Data deduplication offers the promise of a significant reduction of stored data by identifying repetitive storage of identical data. Once duplicate data is identified by deduplication algorithms (such as various Hash algorithms), the duplicate data is replaced by a stub that points to a parent copy of the data, thus greatly reducing the amount of data stored.